It’s no secret that reporting is a critical business function, helping you to understanding everything from your inventory and product sales to the overall performance of your fashion business. It’s also no secret that reports can take hours or days to create. Whether your managers are producing their own reports or your IT team is tasked with responding to your company’s reporting needs, the process likely takes your team members away from more important responsibilities, from customer service and sales to software development or network management.
At AIMS360, we recognize the dichotomy that is the reporting process, and have developed a new reporting feature for our apparel ERP software that eliminates steps, saving your team time and effort. The feature called Memorized Reports offers a variety of benefits to the end users; primarily the ability to set up and “memorize” a frequently used report with criteria so that you can come back in the future and run it with a single click of a button. Prior to Memorized Reports, AIMS360 users were required to put in the same criteria every time they wanted a report; regardless if it was the same report run the previous week or previous day. Memorized Reports eliminates the need to make a lot of selections when you need to run a report.
There are two types of reports that you can make with Memorized Reports; static or dynamic. Based on the criteria you select, you can create a dynamic report that will be constantly updated. Let’s say, for example, you want to create a report that shows monthly sales of a specific brand for just your New York locations. Whenever you run the report you will see the current monthly sales for that brand in New York. The report is always updating, so every time you log into the AIMS360 fashion ERP and click on the Memorized Reports icon, you can quickly select a memorized report and will immediately see the most recent data.
The second type of report is a static report that allows you to select a specific number of styles, customers or locations. When you select the static option, the report will only provide results based on the specific criteria you selected originally. Typically, a static report is run where the majority of criteria won’t change, but the user may desire to select a specific date or date range.
Memorized Reports cut out a major step in the report creation process, eliminating the need for users to memorize criteria. We estimate that you will save one to 15 minutes for each report. There is no limit to how many reports you can ask the system to memorize. You can preserve up to 10 different memorized options of the same report in your AIMS360 system.
Another benefit is that Memorized Reports can be personal, private, or open to the entire company. This will help when new people are added to your team. Reporting will now only take a few minutes of training versus hours.
Many apparel wholesale companies simply don’t have the people, resources or time to invest hours and days into report creation. Every minute of the day counts in the fashion industry, and companies are looking to optimize their processes and maximize their time and talent so they can enhance their bottom line. When it comes to creating reports, Memorized Reports allows you and your team to set it and forget it, so you can focus on other important business needs.
One final note… our team is busy adding a number of new features to AIMS360, including enhancing the reporting features with a scheduler that will further automate the system’s reporting capabilities. Stay tuned!